Page 98 of Over & Out

It is nice, actually. One of the nicest nights I remember in a long time. We bundle up, and I remake those teas we never drank earlier, fixing them in travel mugs so we have something to keep us warm.

Hopper walks with his arm around my shoulder, pulling me in tight against the chill.

“It’s been a long time since I wanted to look at Christmas lights,” I confess.

“Yeah, hasn’t been my jam in a while either,” Hopper says.

We walk in silence for a bit, stopping at the houses with pretty displays up. At the edge of town, I hesitate. “Maybe we shouldn’t walk close like this? In case anyone sees us?”

“Hell no,” Hopper says, pulling me tighter. “I’m cold.”

I laugh.

“It’s fine, bangles. You’ve got a scarf covering your face and you loaned me this woolly-ass animal.”

“Hey, it looks good on you!” I say, looking up at the fur hat I picked up at a vintage store years ago. It’s got ear flaps and strings. It looks a little ridiculous on me but it fits Hopper just right. It does look good on him. But so does everything.

I decide to relax. Main Street is deserted, anyway. Only the odd car has passed us, lights glowing in the distance as the road turns back into the highway.

We talk the whole time. About our favorite Christmases—both of ours so far in the past we still believed in Santa Claus.

“Wait, what do you mean he’s not real?” Hopper asked when I pointed that out.

The best meals we ever ate—Hopper some kind of banana leaf fish in Vietnam; me, a granola bar I ate right after skydiving, when I had to land using my backup parachute. Hopper’s shocked but also not shocked to learn I used to be kind of an adrenaline junkie. “I’m winding down in my old age,” I tell him.

He levels me a look that says I’m not allowed to say old around him.

I don’t tell him I haven’t taken a single physical risk since the dirt bike crash. If you don’t count riding on his motorbike.

Somehow, an hour later, we’ve ended up down at Redbeard Cove beach. It’s stunning. Moonlight stretches in a line across the ocean, and the sound of waves on sand is instantly soothing. In the near distance, a tiny island rises up from the dark. There’s a retreat center there, with hotel rooms. Maybe Hopper and I could go there one day.

One day.

Beyond, there’s rippling ocean and the bigger islands. Past that, open ocean. The air is crisp and smells of salt water and seaweed.

“I can’t remember the last time I was here at night,” I say. “Besides the nights I was working, anyway. But all I wanted to do then was go home and pass out.”

The Rusty Dinghy’s closed now, just a dark blot against the starry sky off to our side.

“How’d you end up working there, anyway?” Hopper asks as we settle on the sand, our backs against a log, his arm wrapped snug around me.

“Kind of a long story,” I say.

“There’s literally nowhere else I’d rather be,” Hopper says. “I want to know everything.”

I look up at him, searching his face in the moonlight. “Seriously, Hopper?”

“Let’s start at birth.”

I laugh, but it dies off quickly. I decide, as a lark, to tell him my life story in fifty words or less.

“I was born here. My mom took off when I was a baby. My dad was a drunk and that got him fired from the fire station. We moved to Swan River, where he got himself killed in a little accident I may have mentioned. I went into the system. No one wanted me. Then I came back here. Begged my childhood bestie’s older brother for a job.”

I laugh, sitting up and curling my arms around my knees. I know it’s weird that I’m being so lighthearted about all of this. “None of that is funny, I know.”

“Humor is a perfectly reasonable response to trauma,” Hopper says. “At least that’s what my old therapist told me.”

I try to picture Hopper in therapy. This big man on a little couch. A little Nietzsche-looking therapist scribbling notes. I know from my own sessions as a kid that it looks nothing like that, but still, the thought makes me smile enough to keep going.

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